The country’s state and federal courts responded quickly to the coronavirus pandemic, adapted courts to hold hearings and found the public ready to serve as jurors, Chief Justice John Roberts said in his annual year-end message on the judiciary.
“Judges from across the country report that, where jury hearings have resumed, responses to jury summonses have reached or exceeded their high expectations for the public’s willingness to participate in the justice system during these very challenging times,” Roberts said.
The pandemic forced courts nationwide to close in March, but in April Roberts said judges led “critical court functions of their home offices – or their kitchen tables” and “quickly or at least eventually” learned to hold audio and video conferences use. tools.
The U.S. Supreme Court was among the contractors and in the spring canceled the courtroom session and instead heard oral arguments through telephone conferences for the first time.
To accommodate jury trials, trial courts have re-arranged spaces, reused large courtrooms to maintain social distance, and installed Plexiglas to keep participants physically separated. Judges in Michigan and Florida held drive-through naturalization ceremonies, and courts in Iowa and Minnesota moved it outward, he said.
Ordinary civil cases decreased by 10% during the year and 25% fewer defendants were charged with immigration offenses, “mainly due to a 70% reduction in defendants accused of improper entry,” his report reads.
Robert noted some of the history of the Supreme Court’s reactions to outbreaks, saying that America’s first chief justice, John Jay, had to sit the young Supreme Court in Philadelphia in 1793 because of the yellow fever epidemic that killed 5,000 of the city’s 50,000 people. residents. “President Washington himself fell ill with a serious case of flu” three years earlier, the report said.
Supreme Court hearings were canceled again in 1918 during the Spanish flu outbreak, the last time the court’s work was interrupted until the Covid-19 pandemic.
